Free players may mine Rune essence in the Rune essence mine. To reach these mines, players need to be teleported by one of several NPCs. Members will also mine Rune essence here until they reach level 30 Mining when they will automatically mine Pure essence on member worlds. Mining from one of the rocks that have an unlimited supply of essence gives 5 Mining experience per essence. Pickaxes are needed, just like any other mining activity.

On free-to-play worlds, a number of Rune essence is given to each player throughout The Great Orb Project activity depending on each round's scores. Free players may also buy Rune essence as a reward from the activity at a cost of 1 Runecrafting Guild Token per Rune essence.

To discourage Real world traders and macroers, Jagex introduced a Rune Essence adjustment update on 20 April 2006. As of then, rune essence was split separately into two different items: Rune essence and pure essence (with an automatic conversion from rune to pure essence for members). Previously, rune essence could be used to craft all runes. However, since the update, the runes only craftable by members required Pure essence, now it could only be mined on member worlds. Rune essence could still be used to craft the first six basic runes, however.

This measure was to try to stop macroers from making a huge profit by simply macroing Rune essence, which was in high demand, especially by free players. However, due to this update, many Rune essence macroers essentially became useless due to a large majority of them being F2P only. After the update, the Rune essence mined without membership would be worthless, since the majority of the buyers would need Pure essence instead to runecraft high-level runes. This caused the demand and price of Rune essence to drop significantly.

It is highly disputed whether this goal was achieved, especially since most of the macros just switched to mining pure essence instead, despite the required subscription fee for membership and level 30 Mining.

It also devalued a good revenue stream for many non-member players, players who could previously have become members with a good supply of usable Rune essence already banked. Since the unbalanced trade update was released, many players suggested merging back both essence types, as there were supposedly no more bots to mine Rune essence.

After the Wilderness and Free Trade update, the price of rune essence suffered a sharp price drop due to botting and real world trading, as with most raw materials.

If you use Rune Essence on the Wise Old Man he will respond with "I couldn't really say whether or not you'll need that", "Please remember that I cannot identify items from members-only quests" even though it is not a members-only item, nor an item obtained in a members-only quest. This is before an update allows the Wise Old Man to check for members quest items.

During the release of the Runespan, a deposit box was added into the Wizard's tower, where Sedridor can teleport a player to the rune essence mine. If a player tries to bank their rune essence in the box, a message will appear telling the player that Sedridor does not want them banking the essence there. However this can still be exploited as there is no prevention from doing the same, but using the deposit box in the Runecrafting Guild.